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The Pro-Family Policy This Nation Actually Needs

If the Trump administration wants more babies, it needs to embrace a different kind of parent.

The Comic Who’s His Own Worst Enemy

The Rehearsal takes the prankster’s quest for self-betterment to new extremes.

The Great Cousin Decline

Families are shrinking. But the weirdest family role is a vital one.

‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’

The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment.

How the World Became Awash in Synthetics

It started in 1934, with a PR crisis.

A Defense Against Gaslighting Sociopaths

If you can recognize their signature move, then forewarned is forearmed.

Parenthood Cannot Be Optimized

Amanda Hess’s new book examines a surplus of experts and gadgets that promise to perfect the experience of raising children.

Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber

A series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments may have confirmed Theodore Kaczynski’s still-forming belief in the evil of science while he was in college.

What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?

“Our boyfriends, our significant others, and our husbands are supposed to be No. 1. Our worlds are backward.”

The Great Language Flattening

Chatbots learned from human writing. Now it’s their turn to influence us.

The New Divide in American Marriage

College graduates are marrying at high rates. Everyone else isn’t.

We’re Back to the Actually Internet

Fact-checking is out, “Community Notes” are in.

Why Are Young People Everywhere So Unhappy?

Here’s the answer to that—and what we can do about it.

The Most Infamous Narcissist in Literary History Gets a Smartphone

A new stage production of The Picture of Dorian Gray conveys the cost of posturing online.

An ‘Impossible’ Disease Outbreak in the Alps

In one tiny town, more than a dozen people were diagnosed with the rare neurodegenerative disease ALS. Why?

Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad

Americans who most reap the benefits of marriage are the same class who get to declare monogamy passé and boring.

What Parents of Boys Should Know

Daughters tend to receive higher levels of affection and patience at home than sons. But the sons might need it more.

How to Define Old Age

Why would the World Health Organization want to call “old age” a disease?

A Trip Into Alaska’s Copper River Valley in 1902

At the end of the 19th century, an estimated 100,000 people joined the Klondike Gold Rush, seeking their fortunes in the interior of Alaska and Canada’s Yukon territory. Many gold seekers who chose the arduous path inland from Alaska’s port of Valdez also discovered rich copper deposits along the way. The U.S. Army soon started work on the Valdez Trail, which would become the main route between the mining fields and Valdez. Several competing businesses rushed to build a railroad along the route. In 1902, one of those groups sent a team of photographers, the Miles Brothers, to document the town, the growing trail, the landscape, its newly arrived residents, and Alaska Natives. Prints of these photographs were collected into an album I was able to digitize recently at the U.S. National Archives, giving us a remarkable glimpse into daily life along a rough trail into the Alaskan interior, nearly 125 years ago.

The Destruction of the Department of Justice

When people at the department embrace Trump’s scorn for the law, the law, as a practical limitation on government action, ceases to exist.